RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=5307

For the past two months, intermittently, I have been barred from Facebook.

The first time it happened was in June, when I tried to post my Israel Hayom column. Suddenly, a window popped up, telling me that inappropriate material had been found on and removed from my page. I was warned that if I continued violating Facebook’s “community standards,” I would be banned from the social network for good.

The notice included a link specifying these standards, and a demand that I click to acknowledge I had read and understood them. Failure to do so, it said, would result in my inability even to open Facebook to read my newsfeed. I complied.

The following statement appeared: “Facebook gives people around the world the power to publish their own stories, see the world through the eyes of many other people, and connect and share wherever they go. The conversation that happens on Facebook — and the opinions expressed here — mirror the diversity of the people using Facebook. To balance the needs and interests of a global population, Facebook protects expression that meets the community standards outlined on this page. Please review these standards. They will help you understand what type of expression is acceptable, and what type of content may be reported and removed.”

Underneath the explanation, examples of unacceptable content were listed. Among these were “violence and threats,” “self-harm,” “bullying and harassment,” “graphic content,” “nudity and pornography,” and “hate speech.”

I was puzzled. Neither I nor anyone else who had shared articles with me had engaged in any of the above. And, as hard as I searched, I couldn’t locate a single dirty picture on my timeline.

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/

It’s hard to remember sometimes that the latest Bloombergian crusade to ban all the sodas, steal all the salt or wall off half the streets to automobile traffic had its roots in another New York City where Times Square was a seedy flickering danger zone, entire neighborhoods were always on the verge of an explosion and the only optimistic people were the ones moving out.

Some twenty years ago, Rudy Giuliani began tackling crime directly with waves of men in blue using
smarter and blunter tactics, and also indirectly by going after “Quality of Life” issues. The theory was that crime came out of social blight. Improve the neighborhood and you reduce crime.

The ubiquitous squeegee men were put out of business and drives rejoiced, Times Square’s acres of sex businesses were broken up to make way for Disney musicals. Homeless encampments that had taken over public places were broken up. Graffiti, prostitution, panhandling and a thousand other behaviors, some criminal, some not, but that contributed to the grimy dangerous city were targeted.

Critics called Giuliani a fascist, but New York City became a better, safer and more prosperous place. It’s hard to remember what a gamechanger the notion was, back then in the dark days of liberalism, that cities didn’t have to be fixed with an endless round of welfare that only added more blight. Instead they could be fixed by enforcing civilized norms that too many had given up on enforcing.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323844804578531732457565050.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTTopOpinion At the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, there is a tree planted in honor of a French priest. Père Marie-Benoît is one of the “Righteous Among the Nations,” non-Jews honored by the state of Israel for protecting and rescuing Jews during that black moment in human history. Working with underground Jewish rescue organizations, […]

http://www.steynonline.com/5686/cinema-ex-machina Of my two local-ish movie theaters in New Hampshire, one has an irksome habit of always showing the film just a little larger than the screen, so that anything happening out on the borders of the frame remains a mystery: If memory serves, it was the most recent Die Hard sequel that had all […]

Meet Today’s Frontpage Pseudo-academic Attacker of Diana West, Jeffrey Herf

Jeffrey Herf is another pseudo-historian whose alleged specialty is “Germany,” and recently, in particular, the supposed “Nazification” of Islam.

He was a major promoter of the idiotic, counterfactual “Kuntzel hypothesis”—a debunking of which you can still read at Frontpage (hurry before they take it down now that I am defending one of the Frontpage “Untermentschen,” Diana West) http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=29031

Of course like Kuntzel, he went about this with the same level of pseudo-academic charlatanism.

If you look at “The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism” I demonstrated this briefly in a footnote, reproduced below.

Herf who is a respected German translator FAILED to translate the writings of von Leers in a manner that reflected their important contents, or context. In Sharia Versus Freedom I further included discussion of a full pious Muslim-perspective treatise on jihad that von Leers wrote in 1942-43, which I arranged to get out of captured German archives held in Russia, and have translated. Got that? I obtained these vaunted “primary source documents,” not the pseudo-academic Herf. They confirmed Leer’s Islamic reverence which, in fact, dated back to the early 1930s—twenty years before he converted to Islam, in Egypt, his conversion being overseen by Hajj Amin el-Husseini.

Leers adopted the name—as I NOT Herf—documented in a primary source letter of Leers I obtained from the Hoover Inst (written to a US Nazi H. Keith Thompson, who, in turn donated his papers to the Hoover)—“Omar Amin von Leers,” in “honor” of both his friend Hajj Amin, AND Caliph Omar (“Rightly Guided” Caliph # 2), the latter because Leers dubbed Caliph Omar, appropriately, as per the hadith, “a bitter enemy of the Jews”!

ZILCH/NADA/NONE of this and more appears in Herf’s “oeuvre” as of 2006—and he was supposed to be the “expert scholar” !

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/355313/remembering-when-we-were-strong-hiroshima-nagasaki-and-moral-necessity-nuclear-strike

Remembering When We Were Strong: Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the Moral Necessity of a Nuclear Strike

In a time when America lacks the strength of will to force an active-duty Army officer (and admitted terrorist) to shave his jihadist beard before appearing at a court-martial, when we wring our hands in guilt over the use of the most precise weapons ever devised against an enemy of unquestioned cruelty and malice, and when we respond to threats with weakness that merely encourages greater violence, it’s worth remembering a time when this nation understood the necessity — the moral necessity — of decisive force.

By July 26, 1945, Imperial Japan was well on its way to defeat, yet it was still capable of great harm. Our navy (with the able and courageous British assistance) had swept the once-fearsome Japanese navy from the seas, and we were slowly destroying Japan’s capacity to wage war. Allied forces were on the move in Southeast Asia, the Soviet Union was poised to enter the conflict with overwhelming force (1.5 million men massed on the border of Japanese-held mainland territory), and the American army was barely a month removed from a decisive victory in the months-long battle for Okinawa. Japan was going to lose the war. It was inevitable.

That was the good news. But that good news was more than tempered by the bad news of the cost of that ultimate victory. It’s tough for us to understand now, as many Americans have spent time in the new Japan, buy Japanese products, and rightly regard Japan as an indispensable ally, but in World War II the Japanese military fought with a ferocity that made al-Qaeda look casual and uncommitted. In Okinawa, the Japanese hurled more than 1,000 kamikaze suicide bombers at the American fleet, and tens of thousands more kamikazes readied to defend the Japanese home islands. Japan still held huge swathes of Chinese territory, where unrelenting war and mass-scale atrocities had already cost more than 10 million Chinese lives.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/355346/chaffetzs-missteps-andrew-c-mccarthy No one has pushed harder than Representative Jason Chaffetz (R., Utah) to get to the bottom of the Benghazi massacre. He has admirably fought to hold President Obama and the administration to account for their shocking derelictions of duty. Nevertheless, one can only be baffled by his tendentious reaction to news that the Justice […]

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/355358/print There’s still a real chance that the Captain Schettinos of the House Republican brain trust will rescue Obama’s presidency by passing an amnesty. But some in the open-borders crowd are getting nervous about John Boehner’s ability to achieve Obama’s objectives. Their fear is that this session of Congress will end with no amnesty bill […]

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Peace/2013/08/08/Did-Uncle-Sam-leave-15000-to-20000-GIs-in-Stalin-s-hands
This is the fifth and final part in a series based on the new book American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character (St. Martin’s Press) by Diana West.

On March 3, 1945, under prodding from both the senior US military commander and US ambassador in Moscow, FDR cabled Stalin to request “urgently” that provisions be made for ten American rescue crews to move in and out of Soviet-captured territories to evacuate liberated American prisoners or war, many of whom required medical attention. With uncharacteristic punch, FDR underscored his request as being “of the greatest importance.”

On March 5, 1945, Stalin replied: Nyet. There were no groups of American ex-POWs in the Red zone, so no flights necessary. The Soviets would tell the British the same thing about an estimated 20,000 to 30,000 British ex-prisoners.

The US ambassador, Averill Harriman, knew Stalin was lying. He was hearing about hundreds, even thousands of lost American men roaming Soviet-held territory, and he was hearing straight from some who had made their way to Moscow.

On March 6, 1945, the Soviets forcibly took over Romania, shredding the Yalta agreement.

On March 8, 1945, Harriman cabled FDR that he had positive proof that Stalin’s statement regarding American POWs “was not repeat not true.” He stated that some three to four thousand Americans had been freed from German POW camps and were still unaccounted for.

On March 16, 1945, Churchill cabled FDR. “At present all entry into Poland has been barred to our representatives… This extends even to the liaison officers, British and American, who were to help in bringing out rescued prisoners of war… There is no doubt in my mind that the Soviets fear much our seeing what is going on in Poland.”

http://www.dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/2613/Rediscovering-Americas-Truth-Tellers-Julius-Epstein.aspx NOTE: This is the third in an occasional series on the truth-tellers of American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character (St. Martin’s Press). One point I try to convey when speaking to audiences about my new book, “American Betrayal,” is the inspiration of the truth-tellers. These are the men and women who […]